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How To Calculate Portfolio Risk and Return

To calculate the risk and return of a portfolio, one must determine the weighted average return of the individual assets in the portfolio based on their weights. The risk of the portfolio, measured by standard deviation, takes into account not only the standard deviations of individual assets but also their covariance (how their returns move together). For a two asset portfolio, the standard deviation calculation involves the weights, individual standard deviations, and covariance. This can be represented by a matrix multiplication of the asset weights vector, variance-covariance matrix, and transpose of weights vector.

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114 views3 pages

How To Calculate Portfolio Risk and Return

To calculate the risk and return of a portfolio, one must determine the weighted average return of the individual assets in the portfolio based on their weights. The risk of the portfolio, measured by standard deviation, takes into account not only the standard deviations of individual assets but also their covariance (how their returns move together). For a two asset portfolio, the standard deviation calculation involves the weights, individual standard deviations, and covariance. This can be represented by a matrix multiplication of the asset weights vector, variance-covariance matrix, and transpose of weights vector.

Uploaded by

Calvin Yeoh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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How to Calculate Portfolio Risk and Return

financetrain.com/how-to-calculate-portfolio-risk-and-return

Risk Management

In this article, we will learn how to compute the risk and return of a portfolio of assets.
Let’s start with a two asset portfolio.

Portfolio Return

Let’s say the returns from the two assets in the portfolio are R1 and R2. Also, assume the
weights of the two assets in the portfolio are w1 and w2. Note that the sum of the weights
of the assets in the portfolio should be 1. The returns from the portfolio will simply be the
weighted average of the returns from the two assets, as shown below:

RP = w1R1 + w2R2

Let’s take a simple example. You invested $60,000 in asset 1 that produced 20% returns
and $40,000 in asset 2 that produced 12% returns. The weights of the two assets are
60% and 40% respectively.

The portfolio returns will be:

RP = 0.60*20% + 0.40*12% = 16.8%

Portfolio Risk

Let’s now look at how to calculate the risk of the portfolio. The risk of a portfolio is
measured using the standard deviation of the portfolio. However, the standard deviation
of the portfolio will not be simply the weighted average of the standard deviation of the
two assets. We also need to consider the covariance/correlation between the assets. The
covariance reflects the co-movement of the returns of the two assets. Unless the two
assets are perfectly correlated, the covariance will have the impact of reduction in the
overall risk of the portfolio.

The portfolio standard deviation can be calculated as follows:

In the above example, let’s say the standard deviation of the two assets are 10 and 16,
and the correlation between the two assets is -1. The standard deviation of the portfolio
will be calculated as follows:

1/3
σP = Sqrt(0.6^2*10^2 + 0.4^2*16^2 + 2*(-1)*0.6*0.4*10*16) = 0.4

Correlation and Covariance

As you can see, the standard deviation can be calculated using either covariance or
correlation. The relationship between the two is depicted below:

In this example, we had taken a simple portfolio of two assets however as the number of
assets in the portfolio increase, the complexity will increase as we will have to consider
the covariance between each pair of the assets in the portfolio. For a three asset portfolio,
the risk and return will be calculated as follows:

The calculation can be simplified by representing the formula in the form of an equation.
For a two asset portfolio the formula can be represented as:

Note that there are there matrices in the calculation. The first one is a one-dimensional
matrix of the asset weights in the portfolio. The second matrix is called the variance
covariance matrix with the variances of the assets as the diagonal elements and the
covariance as the other elements. The third matrix is the transpose of the first matrix.
Multiplying the three matrices gives us the variance of the portfolio. In Microsoft Excel,
you can use the MMULT function to perform matrix multiplication.

This form of variance calculation can easily be expanded to as many assets as we want.

Let’s take the case of a three asset portfolio with asset weights as 0.3, 0.4, and 0.3. The
variance covariance matrix is given below:

The variance of the portfolio can be calculated as follows:

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